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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to code a program that leaks information to the user but does so in a way that can’t be discovered in a code audit. This was the challenge for the 2014 Underhanded C contest; the seventh time they’ve held the event. [Richard Mitton] took part and wrote a very entertaining entry. He didn’t win, but he did just share the details of his super-sneaky code.

The challenge set out for the Citizen-Four-like coders set up a scenario where they were writing a program for a shady company (or sketchy government entity) which makes completely secret decisions based on publicly posted social media. The twist is they were tasked with getting code past an audit that leaked the decisions made by this program to the users being secretly observed.

Above is the core trick which [Richard] used after taking inspiration from…

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We don’t all need super high quality electronic testing gear. Sometimes second-hand or inexpensive equipment is accurate enough to get the job done. Though it can be a bit annoying to miss out on some of those “luxury” features. [Ekriirke] had this problem with his cheap multimeter. He wished the LCD screen had a backlight for easier visibility, so rather than upgrade to a more expensive unit he just added one himself.

After opening up the multimeter [Ekriirke] found that it ran on a single 12V battery. He realized that the simplest thing to do would be to wire up four white LEDs in series. The four LEDs were arranged within the case off to each side of the LCD, one in each corner. The leads were bent at 90 degree angles and soldered together “dead bug” style. Thin strips of copper foil tape were attached to the PCB in such…

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Some of you may have heard the news about sf’s “abandonment project takeover” of GIMP, Nmap, and FileZilla. So the next time you see a project hosted on SourceForge, please take the time to explain to the project leader why they should consider hosting it elsewhere.

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Some of you may have heard that Google+ Photos is dead. At first, I was quite unhappy that Google was senselessly dismantling the world’s best social network. But then I saw that it gives you UNLIMITED FREE storage!

My first thought = stenography;

But then I realized that to get the free unlimited storage, you had to allow the file’s to be compressed down to 16 MP. Surely that would strip out the encoded files. So here == my concept for free unlimited cloud storage: